ISO 13606-5:2010 specifies the information architecture required for interoperable communications between systems and services that need or provide EHR data.

The subject of the record or record extract to be communicated is an individual person, and the scope of the communication is predominantly with respect to that person's care.

ISO 13606-5:2010 defines a set of interfaces to request and provide:

an EHR_EXTRACT for a given subject of care as defined in ISO 13606-1;

one or more ARCHETYPE(s) as defined in ISO 13606-2;

an EHR_AUDIT_LOG_EXTRACT for a given subject of care as defined in ISO/TS 13606-4.

ISO 13606-5:2010 defines the set of interactions for requesting each of these artefacts, and for providing the data to the requesting party or declining the request. An interface to query an EHR or populations of EHRs, for example for clinical audit or research, are beyond its scope, although provision is made for certain selection criteria to be specified when requesting an EHR_EXTRACT which might also serve for population queries.

ISO 13606-5:2010 defines the Computational Viewpoint for each interface, without specifying or restricting particular engineering approaches to implementing these as messages or as service interfaces.

ISO 13606-5:2010 effectively defines the payload to be communicated at each interface. It does not specify the particular information that different transport protocols will additionally require, nor the security or authentication procedures that might be agreed between the communicating parties or required by different jurisdictions.